The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley

by Robert Creeley

  things, of what’s happened, of what a life is

  and was, my life, when I wonder what it meant,

  the sad days passing, the continuing, echoing deaths,

  all the painful, belligerent news, and the dog still

  waiting to be fed, the closeness of you sleeping, voices,

  presences, of children, of our own grown children,

  the shining, bright sun, the smell of the air just now,

  each physical moment, passing, passing, it’s what

  it always is or ever was, just then, just there.

  “To think . . .”

  To think oneself again

  into a tiny hole of self

  and pull the covers round

  and close the mouth—

  shut down the eyes and hands,

  keep still the feet,

  and think of nothing if one can

  not think of it—

  a space in whose embrace

  such substance is,

  a place of emptiness

  the heart’s regret.

  World’s mind is after all

  an afterthought

  of what was there before

  and is there still.

  Old Song

  I’m feeling ok still in some small way.

  I’ve come too far to just go away.

  I wish I could stay here some way.

  So that what now comes wouldn’t only be more

  of what’s to be lost. What’s left would still leave more

  to come if one didn’t rush to get there.

  What’s still to say? Your eyes, your hair, your smile,

  your body sweet as fresh air, your voice in the clear morning

  after another night, another night, we lay together, sleeping?

  If that has to go, it was never here.

  If I know still you’re here, then I’m here too

  and love you, and love you.

  For Ric, who Loved this World

  The sounds

  of his particular

  music keep echoing,

  stay in the soft

  air months after

  all’s gone to

  grass, to lengthening

  shadows, to slanting

  sun on shifting water,

  to the late light’s edges

  through tall trees—

  despite the mind’s

  still useless,

  ponderous thought.

  Oh, do you remember . . .

  Remember sweet Ed

  who despite being dead

  embedded

  all he said

  with lead

  could make you dead

  too if that’s it

  for you,

  oh dummy

  of text,

  be it western or mex?

  He had grace like a swallow’s,

  nothing unfallow,

  “Elizabethan” at root

  with sideburns to boot,

  quick on trigger,

  also with jigger,

  kept an apt time,

  walked with a rhyme.

  I loved his style

  and his guile,

  no friend to the loser,

  vapid day cruiser,

  elsewise bamboozler.

  My Ed was quondam god

  from human sod

  who spoke not loud

  but always clear and proud,

  often with acid edge—

  his pledge

  to keep the faith

  stays constant to this day.

  Paul

  I’ll never forgive myself for the

  violence propelled me at sad Paul

  Blackburn, pushed in turn by both

  our hopeless wives who were spitting

  venom at one another in the heaven

  we’d got ourselves to, Mallorca, mid-fifties,

  where one could live for peanuts while

  writing great works and looking at the

  constant blue sea, etc. Why did I fight such

  surrogate battles of existence with such

  a specific friend as he was for sure?

  Our first meeting NYC 1950 we talked two

  and a half days straight without leaving the

  apartment. He knew Auden and Yeats

  by heart and had begun on Pound’s lead

  translating the Provençal poets, and was

  studying with Moses Hadas at NYU. How

  sweet this thoughtful beleaguered vulnerable

  person whose childhood was full of New

  England abusive confusion, his mother the too

  often absent poet, Frances Frost! I wish

  he were here now, we could go on talking,

  I’d have company of my own age in this

  drab burned out trashed dump we call the

  phenomenal world where he once walked

  the wondrous earth and knew its pleasures.

  Mediterranean I

  This same inexhaustible sea with impenetrable

  Same blue look I stepped into when so young I

  Had no reason for a life more than to hold on to

  The one I had, wife, daughter, and two sons, older,

  If seven and five, just, can be measure of more than

  A vulnerable innocence. The back wheel of bike,

  When brake failed, caught elder son’s heel and used

  It to stop, stripping the skin off almost to the bone.

  I packed the place with ointment and bandaged it, not

  Wanting to see how bad it might be, and for days son

  Went on hop and hand holds spider fashion until,

  Blessedly, it was well again. Oh life, oh miracle of

  Day to day existence, sun, food and others! Would

  Those who lived with me then believe how much

  I loved them? Know how dumbly, persistently, I cared?

  Mediterranean II

  The cranky low decked freighter with orange stickup

  stern cabin we could see from the open window of

  this place each day out there on proverbial ocean has

  moved away, shifting the focus of that blue to an

  implacable distance now going out to a shaded, faded

  edge of sky beyond all recalled dreams or places. One

  so wanted it to be the old time story of them waiting till

  dark at last came and then, with muffled oars, they’d row

  into the hidden cove, climb up the adjoining cliff, and

  into my waiting heart. How many times so long ago I’d

  see the fisherman at nightfall row out into the darkened

  sea with their long awkward boats, oars in unison, to what

  determined fate, and if there were a world at edge of this

  one, there at last they might pull ashore. Now the sea’s slurring,

  recurring sound, its battering, white capped, upon the

  rocks, forces both free and unknown to me, have no work

  but this tedious recurrence, dreams repeated, insistent, useless.

  War

  Blur of world is red smear on white page,

  metaphors useless, thoughts impotent,

  even the sense of days is lost

  in the raging militance.

  No life other than political,

  the fact of family and friends

  subjorned to the general

  conduct of this bitter abstract.

  I look in the mirror

  to see old man looking back,

  eyes creased, squinting,

  finds nothing left.

  He longs for significance,

  a scratch in the dust, an odor

  of some faint fruit, some flower

  whose name he’d lost.

  Why would they hate him

  who fight now insistently

  to kill one another

  —why not.

  Talking

  I was trying to think
of when rightly

  to enter the conversation with all

  the others talking thoughtfully,

  comfortably. There was no occasion

  to say that thirty years in the army was

  a long time or that very probably the

  world is flatter than one thinks. A star

  is as far as one’s eye can see? My shirt

  had broken buttons I had hid with

  my tie. Otherwise I was clean and

  reasonably dressed. Yet, impatient to

  join in, I could hear my voice landing

  suddenly on the edge of another’s

  comment, me saying I can’t now remember

  what, just their saying, “What? What?”

  Bye and Bye

  Faded in face of apparent reality—

  As it comes, I see it still goes on and on,

  and even now still sitting at this table

  is the smiling man who nobody seems to know.

  Older, the walls apparently get higher.

  No one seemingly gets to look over

  to see the people pointing at the sky

  where the old planes used to fly over.

  I packed my own reality in a bag

  and pushed it under the table,

  thinking to retrieve it when able

  some time bye and bye.

  For John Wieners

  Glass roses or something else hardly expected—an

  Abundance of good will, a kind hand in usual troubles.

  Do you hear voices all around you, a sort of whispering,

  Echoing silence as if someone had left a window open?

  Reading those several times with John, we were first

  In a great hall, the Y uptown, where he said he’d heard Auden

  Read, and now we did—the great velvet curtains, the useful

  Sense of a company in the same place where we now stood, echoing.

  Then at Bard, first time I’d met Tom Meyer still a student, and

  We, John, Bobbie and me, had driven up from New York together,

  In bleak aftermath of Olson’s telling John he was going off with Panna,

  On the phone in the Chelsea, the blasted heath we were leaving behind.

  Sweet, you might say, impeccable gentleman, like Claude Rains, his

  Boston accent held each word a particular obligation and value.

  I see his face as still a young man, in San Francisco, hearing him

  Talking with Joanne, hearing him talk with Joe Dunn, with friends.

  When you are a poet as he was, you have no confusions, you write

  The words you are given to, you are possessed or protected by a vision.

  We are not going anywhere, we are somewhere, here where John is,

  Where he’s brought us much as he might himself this evening, to listen.

  I think of all the impossible loves of my life, all the edges of feeling,

  All the helpless reach to others one tried so bitterly to effect, to reach

  As one might a hilltop, an edge of sea where the waves can break at last

  On the shore. I think of just jumping into darkness, into deep water,

  Into nothing one can ever point to as a place out there, just its shadow, a

  Beckoning echo of something, a premonition, which does not warn but ‹invites.

  There is music in pain but not because of it, love in each persistent ‹breath.

  His was the Light of the World, a lit match or the whole city, burning.

  After School

  We’d set off into the woods

  and would climb trees there

  and throw things, shouting

  at one another, great shrieking

  cries I remember—or would, if

  I dreamt—in dreams. In dreams,

  the poet wrote, begin responsibilities.

  I thought that was like going to

  some wondrous place and all was

  waiting there just for you to come

  and do what had to be done.

  Help!

  Help’s easy enough

  If it comes in time.

  Nothing’s that hard

  If you want to rhyme.

  It’s when they shoot you

  It can hurt,

  When the bombs blast off

  And you’re gone with a squirt.

  Sitting in a bunker,

  Feeling blue?

  Don’t be a loser,

  It wasn’t you—

  Wasn’t you wanted

  To go kill people,

  Wasn’t you caused

  All this trouble.

  I can’t say, Run!

  And I can’t say, Hide!

  But I still feel

  What I feel inside.

  It’s wrong to kill people

  Just to make them pay.

  Wrong to blast cities

  To make them go away.

  You can’t take everything

  Away from fathers,

  Mothers, babies,

  Sisters and brothers.

  You live in a house?

  Wipe your feet!

  Take a look around—

  Ain’t it neat

  To come home at night

  And have a home,

  Be able to sit down

  Even all alone?

  You think that anyone

  Ought to get pushed,

  Shoved around

  for some old Bush?

  Use your head,

  Don’t get scared,

  Stand up straight,

  Show what you’re made of.

  America’s heaven,

  Let’s keep it that way

  Which means not killing,

  Not running scared,

  Not being a creep,

  Not wanting to get “them.”

  Take a chance

  And see what they want then.

  Maybe just to be safe,

  Maybe just to go home,

  Maybe just to live

  Not scared to the bone,

  Not dumped on by world

  They won’t let you into,

  Not forgotten by all

  The ones who did it to you.

  Sing together!

  Make sure it’s loud!

  One’s always one,

  But the world’s a crowd

  Of people, people,

  All familiar.

  Take a look!

  At least it won’t kill you.

  Shimmer

  FOR GRAHAM DEAN

  . . . We will all survive, addressed to such glimmering

  shimmering transience with its insistent

  invitation of other.

  So close, so warm, so full.

  I

  At the edge of the evening then, at

  the edge of the river, this edge

  of being, as one says, one’s own

  given body, inexorable me, whatever then

  can enter, what other stays there, initial,

  wave of that changing weather, wind

  lifting off sea, cloud fading northward,

  even one’s own hands’ testament, clenched

  seeming fists—pinch me, pinch

  ME . . . The person inside the mirror

  was hiding, came forward only

  as you did, was too far inside you, too

  much yourself doubling, twinned,

  spun in image as you were, a patient

  reality to provoke simple witness,

  precluded, occluded, still cloudy.

  I am going now

  and you can’t come with me . . .

  There is no one here but you.

  But who are you, who is it

  one takes as life, as so-called reality,

  like the mirror’s shimmering light

  as the sun strikes it, cobwebbed with dust,

  layered with its own substance?

  Oneself is instance, an echo

  mirrored, double
d. Oneself is twin.

  II

  Looking in, you saw

  a faint head there

  at some end of what seemed

  a mass of things, a layered

  density of reflection, which was substance,

  someone. Someone looking back.

  But no one looked out.

  All echo? Semblance?

  No self to come home to,

  no one to say, be yourself— to say, it’s you?

  There is no looking back

  or way of being separate.

  One can only stand there, here, apart

  and see another I still, wherever, inside oneself.

  Sad Walk

  I’ve come to the old echoes again,

  know it’s where I’ve been before,

  see the same old sun.

  But backwards, from all the yesterdays,

  it’s still the same way,

  who gets and who pays.

  I was younger then,

  walking along still open,

  young and having fun.

  But now it’s just a sad walk

  to an empty park,

  to sit down and wait, wait to get out.

  Caves

  So much of my childhood seems

  to have been spent in rooms—

  at least in memory, the shades

  pulled down to make it darker, the

  shaft of sunlight at the window’s edge.

  I could hear the bees then gathering

  outside in the lilacs, the birds chirping

  as the sun, still high, began to drop.

  It was summer, in heaven of small town,

  hayfields adjacent, creak and croak

  of timbers, of house, of trees, dogs,

  elders talking, the lone car turning some

  distant corner on Elm Street

  way off across the broad lawn.

  We dug caves or else found them,

  down the field in the woods. We had

  shacks we built after battering

  at trees, to get branches, made tepee-

  like enclosures, leafy, dense and in-

  substantial. Memory is the cave

  one finally lives in, crawls on

  hands and knees to get into.

  If Mother says, don’t draw

  on the book pages, don’t color

  that small person in the picture, then

  you don’t unless compulsion, distraction

  dictate and you’re floating off

  on wings of fancy, of persistent seeing

  of what’s been seen here too, right here,